As I
write, Donald Trump is in the Middle East, making his way to Israel. What can
we expect? We have predicted that, on the substance, Trump will be another
version of Obama. Since this claim clashes with almost everybody’s perception
of the world, we are forced to defend it.

As
they campaigned for the US presidency, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were
represented in the media, and indeed behaved in public, as diametrical
opposites. Aside from dissimilarities in etiquette and personal style, Trump
loudly repudiated not only Obama’s specific decisions but their very
philosophy, holding Clinton—the public face of Obama’s foreign
policy—personally responsible for fostering the growth of radical Islam and,
in this manner, undermining Israeli security.

The
extreme contrast between Trump and Clinton makes it difficult to imagine them
playing on the same team, so Trump’s electoral victory is a clear challenge
to the idea that the US system is run by a political cartel, the core claim
in the HIR model. This is, therefore, a ‘natural experiment’: the scientist
does not control it, but the variables of interest align fortuitously, as if
he had organized it all himself to test his hypothesis.

Foreign
policy will here give the sharpest possible test. On the nature of the US
political system, there are two possibilities of special interest:

1)If
it is a free market, and Trump and Clinton are genuine rivals, then we expect
Trump’s foreign policy to exhibit sharp differences.

2)If
a power elite-cartel controls both main parties, then we expect, as outlined
in Part
1, that Trump—quite despite his loud protestations to the
contrary—will walk down the traditional path of previous administrations.

That
traditional path, as documented in Part 2,
has long been pro-jihad and anti-Israel (← not an editing
error).

So
far, Trump’s head fakes in immigration policy, the missiles he dropped on
Assad, his declared intention of assisting the Rojavans, and his summit with
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have convinced many people that
Trump really does mean to deliver on his campaign promises. To these people,
the first possibility looks right.

We
are not convinced. In Part 3 we contributed the relevant (though
mostly unknown) historical context in order to dispel the impression created
by the Trump-Netanyahu summit, exposing Trump’s continuity with the
anti-Israeli policies of his predecessors. Since then, Trump has hardly
contradicted our analysis.[0] And in Part 6,
we will expose the true bias of his presumed ‘anti-jihadi’ policies.

Should
you find our analysis persuasive, we will then need to explain this
consistency in US policy—immune to any and all election results.

In Part 4,
we began to outline one such explanation. We examined the history and
structure of the US policymaking system and found that the Carnegie, Ford,
and Rockefeller networks are heavily involved in several key think tanks,
chief among them the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which they helped
create. Year after numbing year, working outside the democratic process, the
CFR produces recommendations that—regardless of who wins at the
polls—reliably become US foreign policy. It walks and talks like a cartel.

This
implies that elections in the US, though utterly necessary to preserve the
appearance of a functioning democracy, are irrelevant to policy, and that’s why the pro-jihadi and anti-Israeli tradition
can persist despite the election of Donald Trump. This is the HIR model.

How
useful is it? The evidence will judge.

The
model predicts, as mentioned in Part 4,
that Trump will recruit his foreign-policy team from the same pro-jihadi, CFR
circles that supplied the key policymakers for previous administrations. To
provide continuity with Obama/Clinton policies, Trump’s handlers will not
hesitate to re-hire them.

We
shall now see how well these expectations match the evidence. I shall examine
those positions most relevant to ‘international security’ and therefore to
policies regarding the growth of radical Islam and the defense of the State
of Israel.

Even
before the election, Trump made clear who whispered in his ear. In mid-2016,
“when Donald Trump was asked by Megyn Kelly who he is listening to as top
national security advisers, the first name Trump mentioned was Richard
Haass.”[1]

Richard Haass

Who
is Haass? Since 2003, he is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR).

Score one for the CFR.

The
president of the CFR will naturally recommend people from his circle. That
influence is apparent in how Trump filled some of his key foreign-policy
positions.

FOREIGN MINISTER
(Rex Tillerson)

Trump’s
Secretary of State—in other words, his foreign minister—is Rex Tillerson, who
before this was CEO of ExxonMobil.[2]

Rex Tillerson

The Rockefeller network has always spread outward from
ExxonMobil, which earlier went by the name Standard Oil, when John D. Rockefeller founded it. So Tillerson
has been one of the biggest players in that network.

Why does this matter?

Because there is no real separation between the Rockefeller
network and the CFR. The Rockefeller network created the CFR, is
still one of its most important patrons, and is directly involved in its
direction. David Rockefeller (John D.’s grandson) became
director of the CFR in 1949 and then stayed on as honorary president (he
passed away March 2017). His daughter Peggy is a CFR member of the board. And
ExxonMobil, the company that
Tillerson was running until recently, is listed as a “founder corporate member” of the CFR.

In other words, the CFR will be running the State Department.

Score two.

THE CIA DIRECTOR
(Mike Pompeo)

Trump
chose Mike Pompeo to head the CIA. Pompeo’s reputation as an anti-jihadist
owes much to his earlier criticisms of Obama (and especially of Obama’s
nuclear treaty with Iran). But we have seen in the cases of Ronald Reagan and
George Bush Jr. that public ‘enemies’ of jihad don’t always mean it (Part 2).

Of
course, some Trump followers will have been delighted with Pompeo’s
nomination because he is a ‘Tea Party Republican’—which means, you would
think, that he is pro-liberty and against the Establishment, no? Think again.

Mike Pompeo

Pompeo
is a big fan of spying on US citizens and believes that Edward Snowden should
be executed.[3]

And
Pompeo is a card-carrying member of the Establishment: he is one of 5 members
of the Distinguished Advisory Committee of the Wichita Council on Foreign
Relations, “having its roots in the prestigious New York Council on
Foreign Relations.” Yep, the CFR.

Though
her NSC stint was brief (reportedly, she will now be ambassador to
Singapore), she strongly influenced perceptions, for she had excoriated
Trump’s softness on jihadism ontelevision. When she was appointed,
her fame no doubt convinced many that Trump would be ‘tough on jihadism.’

K.T. McFarland

But don’t forget: You
are the company you keep. Let us examine a few important relationships.

Caspar Weinberger

Under
Ronald Reagan, McFarland was a close aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger, and so well appreciated by that group that she received in 1985
the highest decoration that the Pentagon can give to a civilian. She was
‘playing ball.’

That
same year, her boss Weinberger was busy helping Reagan and Bush Sr. to send
weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini’s jihadi regime (and to the Nicaraguan
terrorists): the Iran-Contra Affair. (Weinberger’s trial was aborted thanks
to Bush Sr.’s presidential pardon.[4])

Jamestown Foundation

McFarland
is a board member of the Jamestown
Foundation, a think tank focused on issues that are “strategically or
tactically important to the United States.” On that same board has served Zbigniew Brzezinski.
This is the genius who, as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor,
invented—right before Reagan—the policy of arming and training jihadis.
Brzezinski has boasted publicly about this policy, which gave us the Taliban
and Al Qaeda, and then ISIS.[5]

The
Jamestown Foundation has that typical think-tank bipartisanship so diagnostic
of a ruling cartel (see Part 4): Carter’s people and also Reagan’s:
Democrats and Republicans: all in agreement: all pro-jihad.

Left to right: Brzezinski, Weinberger, Reagan

David Petraeus

When Roger Ailes, FOX News founder, wanted to convince General
David Petraeus—chosenby Obama to run CENTCOM and then also
the CIA—to launch a republican presidential campaign funded by Rupert
Murdoch, he sent McFarland in person.[6]

What policies does Petraeus favor?

If McFarland and her former bosses at FOX News—allegedly the
‘pro-Israel’ network—are so besotted with Petraeus that they want him for
president, then he must be a staunch Zionist, no? Doesn’t seem that way.

During his tenure at CENTCOM, with the full weight of his
prestige as commander of US forces in the Middle East and North Africa,
Petraeus became a ‘political general,’ demanding publicly that Obama force
the Israelis, at long last, to create a PLO/Fatah state and thus keep the Muslim states happy.[7]

Oh,
and McFarland is “a life member of the Council on
Foreign Relations.”

Score four.

#2 AT THE NSC
(Ricky L. Waddell)

Major
General Ricky Waddell has replaced K.T. McFarland.[7a]
Waddell is from General David Petraeus’s inner circle, and in fact was, under Obama,one of a handful of top advisors to Petraeus, at CENTCOM,
assisting his revision of strategy.[7b]

Ricky Waddell

Given that Petraeus strongly urged Obama, in public, to give
PLO/Fatah a state in Judea and
Samaria (see McFarland), we may expect a
similar bias in Waddell, especially considering that his boss, H.R. McMaster
(see McMaster), led—in the Obama years—the handful of
top Petraeus advisors that Waddell belonged to.

NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR
(Michael T. Flynn)

This
general, briefly the National Security Advisor, is an interesting character.
Though he is gone now, Trump did choose him, and he was prominent in the
campaign, helping establish, with his reputation, the candidate’s
‘counter-jihad’ bona fides. Flynn’s reputation, however, seems to rest
entirely on his own testimony.

The
story was first aired in an interview to James Kitfield (from Politico), immediately before Flynn
left his post as Obama’s Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
“In remarkably blunt comments for a general still in uniform,” wrote
Kitfield, Flynn accused that he himself was the “lone voice” in the Obama
administration calling for getting tough on jihadists,[8] a claim later reinforced in statements to Seymour Hersh.[9]

According
to this narrative, Flynn was forced out because Obama couldn’t tolerate his
anti-jihadi emotion.

Michael T. Flynn

There is a counternarrative. Unnamed Obama insiders, per the Washington Times, say that Flynn was
ousted not, as he claims, because he had “tougher views than Obama about Islamic
extremism,” but because “Flynn failed to follow guidance from superiors.”[10]
Flynn, they say, has “a deep maverick streak,”[11] and some accuse that “his management
style could be chaotic.”[12]

No
comment on Flynn’s management. But the ‘anti-jihadi’ story is strange. Watch
the dates.

From
2003 to 2008, Bush Jr.’s Pentagon created a vast prison system in Iraq
designed to produce a powerful jihadist movement. Lots of innocent people
were detained without charges and mixed in with condemned jihadi terrorists.
The latter, allowed to control prison social life, coerced everybody into the
jihad. The man in charge, General Douglas Stone, himself called it “jihadi
university.”[13]

After
five years—a bachelor’s degree!—“jihadi university” was dismantled and its
graduates—over the objections of local Iraqi sheiks and the Iraqi
government—were just… let… go…The result
was ISIS.

ISIS
then caused a war in Iraq that spread to Syria.

Is
this what US policymakers wanted? A jihadi war in Syria? Consider the sequel.

In
June 2012,it became public that
Obama’s CIA was running a program to arm the—allegedly democratic—‘Syrian opposition’ to Assad. But there was an
interesting detail: “the arms themselves are coming from Turkey, Saudi Arabia
and Qatar.” Why would these governments
wish to arm democrats?

I ask
because Turkey is run by a thinly-disguised jihadist party. The regimes in
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both openly jihadist. And the weapons were
“funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of
intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood,” a jihadist
organization.[14] Isn’t it more likely that jihadis
will send weapons to other jihadis?

Hold
that thought.

Now,
a policy must be planned and executed. Since this CIA operation was on the Syrian ground at least from
June 2012, it had to be a bureaucratic reality—or at the very least a
definite idea—two months earlier, in mid-April, when Obama nominated Michael Flynn to head military
intelligence (DIA).

Did
Flynn get the nod because Obama wanted someone congenial to pro-jihadi CIA
operations? It’s the obvious hypothesis. The CIA and the Pentagon’s DIA are
members of the same ‘intelligence community.’ And the Pentagon is useful to
any intervention in a foreign war.

After
taking over as DIA Director in July 2012, Flynn produced, in August, a secret report on the war in Syria. This report
confirmed that everybody in the ‘Syrian opposition’ (except for the Rojavans) was indeed jihadist,
including the recipients of CIA-sponsored weapons. Immediately, Obama gave his favorite ‘Syrian rebels’ more weapons
and military training, after which they joined ISIS—i.e.,
the Pentagon’s “jihadi university” graduates—en masse.

Did
Flynn resign in protest? Did Obama get rid of him? Hardly. Flynn stayed until August 2014. This, to me, spells
‘pro-jihadi cooperation.’ So, Flynn’s story, told to Seymour Hersh, that he
was always bombarding the White House with unheeded anti-jihadi emotion, is a
bit strange.[15]

I
like this other story better: Flynn is
pro-jihad. As he left the DIA, he donned a fake ‘anti-jihadi’ and
‘anti-Obama’ costume so the power-elite cartel, in its new ‘Trump’ version,
could later reuse him and continue its pro-jihadi policies as always. It’s
all show.

But
the show, I will allow, is really quite spectacular. During the campaign,

“Speaking
to thousands of supporters… Trump vowed to ‘knock the hell out of ISIS’…
before pointing the finger at the Democrats.

‘ISIS
is honoring President Obama,’ he said. ‘He is the founder of ISIS. He is the
founder of ISIS, okay? He is the founder. He founded ISIS. And I would say
the cofounder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.’ ”[15a]

In
fairness to Bush Jr., he was the
founder of “jihadi university,” out of which came ISIS. But Obama/Clinton did
continue along that path. And who carried out this continuation? None other
than Michael Flynn, Trump’s
co-campaigner and then his National Security Advisor.

Kenneth Juster

Oh, and Flynn brought Kenneth Juster—from the Council on
Foreign Relations—to the National Security Council.[16]

Score five.

(ALMOST) NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR
(Robert S. Harward)

Flynn
was asked to leave when his contacts with Russians became a public
embarrassment. Trump then offered the vacant post to General Robert S.
Harward, who declined. But Trump—or his handlers—did want him. This is once
again revealing, because Harward supported the Bush Jr./Obama policies that
recruited so many Muslims to jihad.

Robert Harward

In the Bush Jr. years, as we saw above, the Pentagon created a
prison system in Iraq where lots of innocent people were imprisoned together
with hardened Islamic terrorists, who then forced the rest to join the jihad.
Operating from 2003 to 2008, this “jihadi university” produced ISIS (see Flynn).

For the first three years of this, 2003-2005, Harward worked
at the National Security Council’s (NSC) counterterrorism office. This job
description, in a normal world, would have led Harward to end “jihadi university.” But perhaps
this is an Orwellian world. Perhaps ‘counterterrorism’ really means
‘pro-terrorism.’

How to find out? We could look at Harward’s earlier postings.[17] But let’s follow him to his next job instead.

In the period 2006-2008, ‘counterterrorism’ expert Robert
Harward was placed in charge of JSOC (special forces) in Afghanistan, where
he started a new “jihadi university” on the model of the first (it’s a
franchise business!). Two-thirds of
those picked up in Harward’s raids, incarcerated in Bagram, were innocent,
according to an internal military report. As in Iraq, once locked up with
hardened jihadis, these innocent were forcibly recruited to jihad.

When Obama came in, he named Harward to “oversee detention operations in Afghanistan.” From
this position, Harward sabotaged an effort to release the innocent; the
jihadi recruitment program continued.[17a]

When
Harward said no, Trump offered the job to Lt. General H.R. McMaster. McMaster’s
nomination allows us to make, once again, the same inferences about Trump.

NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR
(H.R. McMaster)

Trump
came into office declaring that he would do it all differently. Unlike Obama
and Clinton, he would fight the enemies of the US. And, by Jove, he would
call a spade a spade! The danger, he shouted, was “radical Islamic
terrorism.”

[Cut to H.R. McMaster, facing his new
staff at the National Security Council (NSC).]: “[T]he label ‘radical Islamic
terrorism’ was not helpful” announces McMaster, “because terrorists are
‘un-Islamic.’ ” They “are perverting their religion.”

The
Obama/Clinton and Bush Jr. cliques—as the New
York Times points out—used precisely this language, so McMaster’s speech
came as a great relief to professional NSC staff members, “many of them
holdovers from the Obama administration” (and
the Bush Jr. administration).[18]

H.R. McMaster

McMaster’s bias makes it natural that he should appoint Obama
and Bush Jr. stalwarts to advise him:

●Ricky
Waddell, Deputy National Security Advisor, earlier with David Petraeus in the
Obama administration (see Waddell).

●Dina
Habib Powell, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy, earlier a top
aide in the Bush Jr. (she helped
select Bush’s top personnel).

●Lisa
Curtis, Senior Director for South and Central Asia, earlier a CIA hand that
was an advisor in Bush Jr.’s State
Department.

●Fiona
Hill, Senior
Director for Russia and Europe, earlier a national intelligence officer in
the Obama administration.[19]

Obama
and Bush Jr. staffers, Obama and Bush Jr. appointees, and Obama’s and Bush
Jr.’s apologies for Islam. Business as usual, then? Yes, because this is doctrinal.

And who’s been overseeing this doctrine? Why, McMaster!

His previous job, under
Obama, was Deputy Commanding General, Futures of the U.S. Army Training
and Doctrine Command, which educates close to half a million soldiers plus a
fair number of civilians.[20]

Mr.
Aboul-Enein alleges a distinction between “militant Islamists”—ISIS and
others who murder ‘infidels’—and “non-militant Islamists,” such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, which, he claims, is not a threat. One problem with that: the
Muslim Brotherhood helped arm the jihadis in Syria who later joined… ISIS (see Flynn).
So this distinction is without a difference.

And
yet, “McMaster wholeheartedly endorsed [Aboul-Enein’s book] in 2010 as
‘excellent’ and ‘deserv[ing] a wide readership.’ ” This endorsement appears on the back cover.[21]

No
doubt the Muslim Brotherhood is pleased.

The
Brookings Institution also seems pleased. Senior fellow William McCants said
the following in support of McMaster’s “repudiation of [Trump’s] lexicon and
worldview”:

“
‘McMaster, like Obama, is someone who was in positions of leadership and
thought the United States should not play into the jihadist propaganda that
this is a religious war.’ ”[22]

Consider
the logic of that. Jihadists certainly use propaganda—e.g. when they denounce
Western values as supposedly evil. But ‘jihad’ means ‘religious war’ and a ‘jihadist’is the one who fights it. This is a simple definition—not
propaganda.

Why
do Brookings scholars say otherwise? And why do they endorse McMaster?

Here’s
our take. The ruling cartel in the US has for decades supported a pro jihadi policy (Part 2),
working through powerful think tanks
such as Brookings (Part 4). This policy can succeed only if
Westerners do not understand it, so Brookings obscures the very meaning of
‘jihad’ and applauds McMaster for saying that “terrorists are ‘un-Islamic.’ ”

Now
consider the following four facts, all consistent with this model:

●“Qatar
[has been] arguing that Muslim Brotherhood-style political Islam is the Arab
world’s best hope for democracy”;

●Qatar
allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and with Obama to arm and train the
jihadists in Siria that later joined ISIS
(see Flynn);

●“the
Qatari government [is] the single biggest donor to Brookings” and its former
prime minister “sits on the center’s advisory board”[23];
and

Well, McMaster belongs to David Petraeus’ circle and, as noted
above, Petraeus—Obama’s man—has been quite adamant that the Israelis should
be made to genuflect and forced to accept the creation of a PLO/Fatah state in Judea and Samaria (see McFarland).[23a]
McMaster now promises that Trump will call for “Palestinian self-determination”
in his trip to Israel.[23b] No surprises there.

Oh, and H.R.
McMaster is a “member of the Council on Foreign Relations.”

Score six.

DEFENSE SECRETARY
(James Mattis)

James
Mattis was, under Obama, commander of
CENTCOM—which oversees US military operations in North Africa and the Middle
East—from August 2010 to March 2013. In other words, he was the man on the ground, in charge in the key
‘Area of Responsibility’ when Leon Panetta (Obama’s CIA director, then his
secretary of defense) and Michael Flynn (Obama’s DIA director) partnered with
the Muslim Brotherhood to arm and train the Pentagon’s jihadists in Syria
(see Flynn).

Patterson
is reportedly close to David Petraeus, the general who loudly calls for
removing Judea and Samaria from Israel to create there an independent PLO/Fatah state (see McFarland).
She is also close to Leon Panetta. And, perhaps not coincidentally, Patterson
seems cozy, too, with the Muslim Brotherhood.

James Mattis and Anne Patterson

Right after forcing Hosni Mubarak out of power in Egypt, Obama demanded immediate elections,
which only the Muslim Brotherhood could organize quickly enough for. Then he
sent Patterson to be his ambassador to Cairo. Patterson was there when,
thanks to Obama, Mohammed Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected
president, and also when he was ousted after dramatic, widespread
demonstrations. She was Obama’s mouthpiece at the epicenter, voicing Obama’s
intense displeasure that the Muslim Brotherhood had been removed from power.

There
is a widespread perception among Egyptians that Patterson was a US tool to
impose Muslim Brotherhood rule upon them.[25]

Mattis
was unable to make Patterson responsible for Pentagon policy because two
senators became stubbornly opposed; but though she wasn’t confirmed, it is
clear where Mattis himself wants to go—or, rather, keep going. That may
explain why the CFR seems so happy with him.

“Max
Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Mr
Mattis would be a ‘great choice.’ ‘He is not only a consummate warrior but
also a deeply learned student of warfare. He would bring a thoughtfulness and
wisdom to the cabinet that is badly needed. He is also a man of unassailable
probity — another important attribute that this administration needs,’ said
Mr Boot.”[26]

Score seven.

DEPUTY ADVISOR ON COUNTERTERRORISM
(Sebastian Gorka)

Sebastian
Gorka, “a former Breitbart News national security editor and fixture on Fox
News,” gets a lot of criticism from the ‘left’ as a supposed ‘Islamophobe’
hard-liner. Talking Points Memo,
for example, considers Gorka to be in the “anti-Muslim fringe” and therefore
entirely beyond the pale.

TPM
relies on two quoted experts: Omid Safi, director of Islamic Studies at Duke
University, and author of Memories of
Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters, and Engy
Abdelkader,
professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (Georgetown
University), and author of When
Islamophobia Turns Violent.

Gorka’s
book, Defeating Jihad, these two
say, is “ ‘propaganda’ ” and replete with “ ‘anti-Muslim bigotry and
prejudice.’ ” His opinions of Islam are “ ‘sloppy, superficial, bigoted, and
ideological.’ ” Besides, Gorka regularly appears on a radio show hosted by
Frank Gaffney, whom TPM calls an “anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist” heading an
“anti-Islam think tank.”[27]

Omid Safi and Engy Abdelkader

Such reactions by the ‘left’ might suggest that Gorka really
does fit with Trump’s campaign promise to fight jihadism. And yet the
counter-jihad movement doesn’t seem happy with him either.

Jihad Watch, for example, complains that
“President Trump continues to speak about ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ while
hiring people who remain in Obamoid fantasyland.” One of these people,
according to Jihad Watch is no other
than Sebastian Gorka. An article by John Guandolo accuses that, in a radio
presentation,

“Sebastian
Gorka stated ‘99.9% of Muslims do not support terrorism (jihad)’ despite a
mountain of evidence and polling data proving this comment untrue.”[28]

Indeed,
surveys show that Muslims in Western countries are being radicalized, and
every day there is greater support among them for suicide bombings against
‘infidels.’ In the United States, where Gorka lives, 15% of young Muslims say
they are in favor.[29]

The
piece in Jihad Watch also
fulminates that

“Gorka
ends [his book] with the call for the United States to spend billions of
dollars supporting ‘Muslim reformers’ in their ‘ideological war to delegitimize
the message of holy war against the infidel and bolster modern
interpretations of Islam.’ ”

What
rankles is Gorka’s presumption that “the message of holy war against the
infidel” can be “deligitimiz[ed]” from
withinIslam as ‘un-Islamic,’
which brings Gorka’s language close to McMaster’s. This “demonstrates,” says
the author,“that Sebastian Gorka
is either completely free of any clue of Islamic doctrine or is intentionally
lying about what Islam actually teaches.”

Indeed,
if Gorka believes that violent jihad is ‘un-Islamic,’ then he does not
understand the content of the Qur’an, the content of the hadiths, the normative weight of the Sira (Muhammad’s accepted biography), or the canonical
interpretations of the most respected scholars in the Muslim tradition (such as
Ibn Hazm of Cordoba). And if so, he is no different from most
Western officials, whose representations of Islam have been denounced by
prominent ex-Muslims—such asAyaan Hirsi Ali—as irresponsible
apologies for Islamic doctrine.[30]

Is
Gorka, then, only a pretend
‘counter-jihad’ warrior? You are the
company you keep.

Gorka
consorts with Frank Gaffney, who parades himself as a counter-jihadist. But Gaffney,
starting in the 1970s, was an aide to Richard Perle, and later worked with
him at Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon, which worked overtime to arm the jihadist
Khomeini regime in Iran (Part 2).
Perle was deeply involved with that circle and assisted Iran’s expansion into
Iraq.[31]

Gorka’s
wife Katharine—part
of Trump’s U.S. Department of Homeland Security transitional ‘landing
team’—was director of the Hungarian office of the National Forum Foundation,
led by James Denton. This Denton has received an
award for his prominent role assisting the jihadi destruction of Yugoslavia.[32]

Denton
has also directed Heldref Publications, established by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a member of Ronald Reagan’s National
Security Council and heavily involved in the conspiracy to send weapons to
Khomeini’s jihadi regime in Iran.

Sebastian (with bocskai)and
Katharine Gorka

Then there is the question of Sebastian Gorka’s apparent
sympathies with groups that espouse antisemitism.

The
clue comes from Trump’s inaugural, to which Gorka, of Hungarian origin,
decided to wear a bocskai. This
frankly odd piece of attire, one guesses, was worn to make a statement. And
that’s how followers of Jobbik—Hungary’s second strongest party, considered
very ‘far right’—took it. Thus, “a few far-right Hungarian publications wrote
up approving stories about Gorka’s attire shortly after inauguration.” But
why would they see Gorka’s bocskai as
a salute to them? Because that’s how they
dress: Jobbik followers “have taken to wearing bocskai jackets to formal events.”[33]

Context
is everything.

How
‘far-right’ is Jobbik? Well, French politician Marine Le Pen—also called ‘far
right’—“has ruled out forming a group with Jobbik in the European Parliament,
considering it too extreme.”[34] Why “too extreme”? Perhaps because
Jobbik “ha[s] been accused of anti-Semitism,”[35] whereas Le Pen has been working hard
to soften her party’s antisemitic reputation.[38]

Is it
fair to accuse Jobbik of antisemitism?

Consider
that Jobbik followers are fond of Miklos Horthy (which explains the bocskai, “popular during Horthy’s
rule”).[36] They like him so much that, each
year, they commemorate Horthy’s 1919 march on Budapest.[37] That’s a bit of a giveaway because Horthy ruled Hungary in
WWII, allied with the Nazis, and deported more than 400,000 Jews to
Auschwitz.

Or
consider Csanad Szegedi. This character, a onetime “rising star” in Jobbik,
first “came to prominence as a founder member of the Hungarian Guard,” a
group that, before it was banned by courts in 2009, “wore black uniforms and
striped flags recalling the Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi party which governed
Hungary at the end of World War II and killed thousands of Jews.” Not
surprisingly, Szegedi “was notorious for his antisemitic comments.” None of
this embarrassed Jobbik. But when political enemies of Szegedi documented
that he was from a Jewish family, that was
embarrassing. Szegedi was forced out of Jobbik.[39]

A younger Gorka, wearing the same bocskai (from Facebook)

Gorka is of Hungarian origin, and lived, studied, and worked
in Hungary for years, where he held high-profile government jobs and became a
media ‘expert on counterterrorism.’ It is hard to accept that Gorka wore a bocskai to the Trump inaugural without
understanding that Hungarian antisemites—now running Hungary’s second-biggest
party—would see it as a ‘high five’ to them.

WHITE HOUSE CHIEF STRATEGIST
(Steve Bannon)

Long
before becoming Trump’s campaign strategist, Steve Bannon had made a name for
himself as a ‘counter-jihadist.’ His visibility contributed strongly to the
perception that Trump will be ‘tough on Islam.’ And he continues to have that
effect, because Bannon is now, according to many, ‘the power behind the
throne,’ calling all the shots. TIMEmagazine
called him “The Great Manipulator” and “The second most powerful man in the
world.”[40]

By presidential
memorandum, Trump included Bannon in the National Security Council. When this
created too much controversy, the new head of the NSC, H.R. McMaster,
officially removed Bannon from this NSC role. But, even so,

“Bannon
retains a top-level national security clearance, the ability to sit in
on most NSC meetings, and a West Wing office steps away from the Oval Office
door.”[41]

Moreover,
Bannon helped select McMaster as head of the NSC. Few doubt that Bannon’s
influence will be strongly felt in Trump’s foreign policy.

So,
who is Bannon?

Steve Bannon

Until
recently, he was executive chair of Breitbart
News, which claims to speak for the ‘alt-right’ movement. “We think of
ourselves,” says Bannon, “as virulently anti-establishment, particularly
‘anti-’ the permanent political class.”[42]

Really?
Among other high-profile jobs, Bannon once worked as special assistant to the
Chief of Naval Operations—the top admiral at the Pentagon.[33] He was always ‘Establishment.’

And
his high-profile Pentagon stint was during the Reagan administration, when Pentagon top-chief Caspar Weinberger
colluded secretly with other top Reagan officials to send weapons to Khomeini’s
jihadi regime in Iran. Bannon remembers those days fondly: he wrote and
directed In the Face of
Evil, a documentary film celebrating Ronald Reagan.

Bannon
fits right into the pattern we’ve been tracing here.

Is
the ‘alt right’ just another cartel con? Perhaps. The late Andrew Breitbart,
founder of the ‘alt right’ internet mecca,
Breitbart News, also helped launch the Huffington Post, at the very opposite end of the political
branding spectrum.[43]

Conclusion

For
anyone casually perusing the Western media, Donald Trump will appear as an
erratic and ineffective man, perhaps, but sincerely committed to getting
‘tough on jihadism,’ and hence a big contrast with his predecessor, Barack
Obama, and with his campaign rival, Hillary Clinton. But is this true? Or is
it a show?

Put
another way: Is the US system, as they tell us, a free political market, with
democratic responsiveness to the people? Or does a political cartel—entirely
immune to the result of any election—have a stranglehold on power? To try and
decide, we may look at how Trump filled his top slots with foreign policy
responsibilities.

We
have seen Donald Trump, Mr. ‘anti-Establishment,’ getting mostly people from
the Obama and Bush Jr. administrations to fill appointments with top
foreign-policy responsibility. He is using mostly people that have been
heavily involved with pro-jihadi
and anti-Israeli policies, which,
as explained in Part 2, are quite traditional. And a crushing
majority of these appointments involve people who have membership in, or are
closely connected to, the group we identified in Part 4
as the brain behind US policy: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). All of
this follows rather closely the predictions of the HIR model, built on the
hypothesis that a political cartel runs the United States.

In
our next article, we will argue that the ruling cartel—despite Trump’s
apparent missteps—is in fact getting precisely what it wants. When Trump is
understood as an avatar of this cartel, as we shall see, even his
wildest-seeming idiosyncrasies fall into a coherent pro-jihad pattern.

To
make this case, we will focus on Trump’s anti-Mexican offensive, a master
psychological warfare move on the world geopolitical chessboard.

[4]Kornbluh, P., & Byrne, M.
1993. The Iran-Contra Scandal: The
declassified history. New York: The New Press. (p.xvii)

[5]In order to justify its
intervention in Afghanistan, the US government defended the following
interpretation. There was a pro-liberty
movement in Afghanistan that was trying to free Afghans from communism.
The USSR had invaded Afghanistan to assist the Afghan communist government in
its efforts to crush liberty. So the US was intervening in reaction to Soviet policy and in favor of Afghan liberties.

This
had to be repeated loudly and often, because the beneficiaries of US policy
called themselves mujahedeen, which
means ‘jihadi holy warriors.’ Soon they were traveling all over the world
that Muslims could be found, initiating or joining new jihads.

The
Afghan mujahedeen were the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who launched
this policy in the last stages of the Jimmy Carter presidency—that is, long before the Soviet incursion in
Afghanistan. We know this because Robert Gates, ex-CIA director, couldn’t
keep quiet about it and bragged. Then Zbigniew Brzezinski, apparently not
wishing for Gates to take all the credit, confessed to Le Nouvel Observateur in a 1998 interview that the Carter
administration had indeed deliberately created and trained the Afghan
jihadists in order to attack the Soviet Union. They always wanted jihadists.
It was no mistake.

You
may click here to see an image of the original
article in Le Nouvel Observateur.
Here below is the English translation:

Full text:

Question: The former director of the CIA,
Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American
intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months
before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security
adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is
that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official
version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to
say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality,
secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3,
1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the
opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a
note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid
was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert
action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and
looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to
intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by
asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the
United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was
a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent
idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want
me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I
wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR
its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war
unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the
demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic
fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The
Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the
liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and
repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy
in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam
in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading
religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common
among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism,
Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what
unites the Christian countries.

[6] When Roger Ailes—“the longtime
Republican media guru, founder of Fox News and its current chairman”—wanted
to get Petraeus to run for president (promising that Rupert Murdoch would
finance the campaign), it was K.T. McFarland who personally delivered that
message, taking advantage of that moment to ask Petraeus how they should
modify content at Fox News to make him happy.

[17]Earlier, Harward
had been deputy commander of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force
in support of Operation Joint Forge in Bosnia. Joint Forge was one of the
code names for SFOR. The point of SFOR was officially to “deter hostilities
and stabilize the peace” in Bosnia. Unofficially, this meant repressing the
Bosnian Serbs so that the terrorist and rabid jihadist Alija Izetbegovic
could consolidate his NATO-supported andIranian-supported victory. To learn
more about this, read on.

That
city was supposed to be a ‘safe haven,’ and the UN blue helmets, in this case
Dutch soldiers, were the ones supposed to keep it safe.

After the
events and the accusations against the Serbs, in 2002, Dutch investigator
Cees Wiebes was asked to put together an addendum to the official Dutch
report on Srebrenica, for which he received unlimited access to the Dutch
intelligence archives.

What
Wiebes found out should have shaken the world; as it happened, it shook
Holland.

Wiebes
documented that the Muslim ranks in Bosnia overflowed with jihadi terrorists
from other parts of the world, imported to Bosnia by agency of a joint
operation of the Pentagon and the Iranian ayatollahs. There was such a stir
over this in Holland that the Dutch government—implicated in all this, for
its troops had been on the ground—saw fit to resign.

The
Bosnian Muslim faction that NATO supported with imported Muslim ‘holy warriors’
was led by Alija Izetbegovic, a rabid jihadist who back in 1970 had published
the book The Islamic Declaration. In this book, Izetbegovic wrote:

“There
can be neither peace nor coexistence between ‘the Islamic Religion’ and
non-Islamic social and political institutions…”(p.30)

Since
he considered Western democracy and Islam entirely incompatible, Izetbegovic
recommended cleansing Bosnia of ‘infidels’ to establish there an orthodox
Sharia state.

For
several years, Izetbegovic was imprisoned in Yugoslavia for thus attempting
to incite Bosnian Muslims to wholesale slaughter. Then he was released. Right
before the Bosnian elections of 1990, Izetbegovic republished this jihadi
screed as campaign platform.

But
as most Bosnian Muslims didn’t like that, they didn’t vote for him. So
Izetbegovic ousted the duly-elected moderate Muslim—and Serbian ally!—Fikret
Abdic. Then he launched a terror war against the Serbs and against Abdic’s
(quite numerous) Bosnian Muslim followers.

To
this end, Izetbegovic recreated the SS Handzar Division that Hajj Amin al
Husseini, a jihadist allied with the German Nazis (and,
later, creator of PLO/Fatah!), had
organized in Bosnia during WWII.

Meanwhile,
the US government, assisted by the mainstream Western media, claimed the Serbs were the genocidal maniacs, and
painted Izetbegovic as a besieged multiculturalist—allegedly a tolerant,
democratic stalwart. In order to thus turn the Yugoslav civil wars upside
down, spectacular frauds were perpetrated. These frauds the public still does
not understand.

But
despite all that help, Izetbegovic was losing, so the Pentagon allied with Iran to import into Bosnia hordes of
mujahedeen veterans from other ‘holy wars’ around the globe.

3)“What really happened in Bosnia?: Were the Serbs the criminal aggressors,
as the official story claims, or were they the victims?”; Historical and Investigative Research;
19 August 2005; by Francisco Gil-White

The
above mentions the appointments of Lisa Curtis and Fiona Hill. For Dina Habib
Powell, see her Wikipedia page.

[20]According to McMaster’s
résumé, he was formerly the Deputy Commanding General, Futures of
the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which “operates 37 schools and
centers at 27 different locations” and educates “443,231 [US] soldiers;
36,145 other-service personnel; 8,314 international soldiers; and 28,310
civilians.”

[23a]In
his book on Petraeus, Peter R. Mansoor explains that H.R. McMaster was a
member of Petraeus’ closest inner circle, and led the Joint Strategic
Assessment Team that Petraus created to review strategy.

SOURCE: Mansoor, Peter R. (2013). Surge: My Journey with General David
Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press (p.104).

[29]In 2007, the Pew Research Center
conducted 55,000 interviews with Muslims in the United States. Pew concluded
that these Muslims are “highly assimilated,” but Pew’s own data dispute that.

According
to the interview data, 9% of Muslim Americans older than 30 consider suicide
bombings against ‘infidels’ justified. That’s already too high for comfort,
in my view. But “the survey finds that younger Muslim Americans—those under
age 30—are both much more religiously observant and more accepting of Islamic
extremism than are older Muslim Americans.” In this younger group, the
percentage of those who believe suicide bombings against ‘infidels’ are OK
rises to 15%.

“A
pattern of greater acceptance of suicide bombing among young Muslim Americans
corresponds with the Pew Global Attitude Project’s findings among Muslims in
Great Britain, France, Germany and Spain.”

This
suggests that, even in countries where Muslims are surrounded by a liberal
ideology, there is a trend toward radicalization, and that we may expect, in
the future, higher percentages of Muslims in the West with a jihadi ideology.

Moreover,
it is almost certain that Pew’s study grossly underestimates the true
numbers, because it is natural for Muslim Americans to fear being identified
as jihadis, and in fact, in the interviews, many said they felt they were
being monitored by the US government.

[30]Refugees from Islam in the West,
such as Ayan Hirsi Ali, have been explaining for a
long time that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam.’ Practicing Muslims
seem to agree. Consider Turkey’s most important politician, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a big fan and ally of
the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Jihad
Watch:

“Speaking
at Kanal D TV’s Arena program, PM Erdogan commented on the term ‘moderate
Islam,’ often used in the West to describe AKP [Erdogan’s party] and said,
‘These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our
religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s
it.’ ”

And at Muslim events in the West, Muslim speakers, before audiences
that identify to the last person as normal—not
‘radical’—Muslims, have denounced the idea that killing homosexuals,
infidels, etc., is in any way ‘radical.’ This is just normal, traditional
Islam, they insist.

HIR’s
own research into Islamic doctrine agrees with this view. Moderate
Muslims certainly do exist—in other words, people who say ‘I am a Muslim’
and who also want to live in peace with their neighbors of all religions. But
this peaceful stance finds scant support in the Islamic teachings, so whereas
moderate Muslims (i.e. people who call themselves Muslims but don’t want to kill
‘infidels’) are good people, they
are not proper Muslims.

[31]After the Reagan years, Richard
Perle became chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a creation of the Reagan
administration, which advises the Pentagon. In this capacity, during the Bush
Jr. administration, Perle became “one of the most outspoken and influential
American advocates of war with Iraq.” That war happened, and it
became the greatest gift to the Iranian jihadis, who have now
inherited Iraq.

Meantime,
Perle continued to have dealings with Adnan Kashoggi, earlier “one of the
middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran
in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.”

[32]According to the Wikipedia entry
on Denton,
he received a “commendation from the Coordinating Group of the Serbian
Opposition for his support of their successful effort to overthrow Slobodan
Milosevic.” That ‘Serbian Opposition’ was called OTPOR, and OTPOR was trained
by the CIA to undermine Slobodan Milosevic, the democratically elected leader
of Yugoslavia.

Will Trump be different? Israeli patriots expect
him to be. After all, he postures as an enemy of Iran and ISIS. But, what
evidence will be diagnostic that Trump really is delivering on his Mideast
promises?

Can Trump (assuming he wants to)
transform US foreign policy in the Middle East? To get a sense for how
difficult this might be, we must appreciate how traditional the pro-jihadi
policy has been. (It wasn’t just Obama.)

According to many in the mainstream
media, the Trump-Netanyahu summit evidenced a ‘pro-Israeli’ turn. That would
be a direct challenge to the HIR model. But we don’t see it. The result of
the summit, we claim, was ‘pro Iran.’ To say otherwise, as we show,
requires important historical omissions.

Is US policy-making run by a bipartisan elite
cartel? Perhaps the president is a figurehead; the media show changes, but
the long-term goals—chosen by the CFR—are always the same. If so, Trump’s
Middle East policies will feel different, but they will yield familiar
fruits.